Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“If you’re going to campaign, and protest, and blockade, and do direct actions, you have to be willing to talk to all the players and work out solutions. Otherwise, that’s not campaigning, it’s just complaining.”

“We need to remember that a problem without a solution is a tragedy. A problem with a solution that is not being implemented is not a tragedy, it’s a scandal.“

“It’s not enough to sit back and let someone else decide the fate of our children’s future. You wouldn’t let someone else decide where your kids go to school, and you shouldn’t let someone else decide what kind of air they’re going to breathe. The world is changing. And it will change by default or design to a post-carbon economy. If we allow it to change by default, there will be far more casualties.”

“This is a crazy time we are living in and we simply can’t afford to keep spewing junk into our atmosphere, where it is building up and smothering the planet. For decades we have been burning our way through oil and coal and treating our atmosphere like an ashtray. Now, according to the United Nations, the economic implications, including the impact on water, food and human dislocation, make climate change the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.”

“We’ve come a long way from the days of solar panels and windmills being the pipe dream of some West Coast hippies. The changing market for clean energy and world leaders’ recognition of the need to address environmental challenges has created a tipping point that truly gives us an opportunity to re-envision the world.”

“We don’t need to be rocket scientists, we don’t need to build a new widget––we need to find ways to organize, to engage civil society in demanding that our elected officials and major corporations put in place the policies and laws that will regulate pollution, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and stimulate the use of the clean technologies that already exist.”

“The most amazing, inspiring and frustrating thing that occurred to me when I started looking into these issues wasn’t that we can’t address them, it’s that we can and don’t.”

“The past one hundred years have been a frenzy of development and pollution. We’ve benefited in many ways, but now we’re starting to live the repercussions. It’s as if we’ve thrown a massive party in our parents’ house and have to clean up the mess in the living room before Mom and Dad get home––except in this case it’s our grandchildren’s house that we’ve completely trashed.”

“So this isn’t a book to convince you of the dangers of climate change. There are many excellent books out there that are exhaustively referenced that will do that and scare your socks off. This is a book to convince you to get off your butt so you can kick some––starting with your nearest politician’s. We’re living in an unsustainable world, it’s not healthy for our kids, and if we keep on this track, it’s not going to last.”